Strengthening America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, as you know, I seldom rise on this floor to contradict somebody on the other side. Over the years, I have worked very hard to work in a bipartisan way with the Presiding Officer and with my Republican colleagues, but these crocodile tears that the Senator from Texas is crying for the first responders are too hard for me to take.

They are too hard for me to take because when the Senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my State was flooded. It was under water. People were killed. People's houses were destroyed. Their small businesses were ruined forever. Because of the Senator from Texas, this government was shut down for politics.

He surfed to a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses but was of no help to the first responders, to the teachers, and to the students whose schools were closed with a Federal Government that was shut down because of the junior Senator from Texas.

It is his business--not my business--why he supports a President who wants to erect a medieval barrier on the border of Texas, who wants to use eminent domain to build that wall, and who wants to declare an unconstitutional emergency to build that wall. That is the business of the Senator from Texas.

I can assure you that in Colorado if a President said that he was going to use eminent domain to erect a barrier across the State of Colorado, across the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and he was going to steal the property of our farmers and ranchers to build his medieval wall, there wouldn't be an elected leader from our State who would support that idea.

That comes to my final point--how ludicrous it is that this government is shut down over a promise the President of the United States couldn't keep and that America is not interested in having him keep. This idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, taking it from the farmers and ranchers who were there, and have the Mexicans pay for it isn't true. That is why we are here, because he is now saying the taxpayers have to pay for it. That is not what he said during his campaign.

Over and over he said that Mexico would pay for the wall--over and over again.

I was going to talk about what he said about the junior Senator's father, but I am going to let that alone. It was after that.

Now we are here with the government shut down over his broken promise, while the Chinese are landing spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. That is what they are doing, not to mention what they are doing in Latin America and with their One Belt, One Road Initiative in Asia. That is what they are doing while we are shut down over a promise he never thought he could keep and didn't keep.

Finally, this idea that my colleague from Texas--and I am sorry to say this because I respect him. He is obviously a very intelligent person, but this idea that Democrats are for open borders is gibberish, and it is proven by what the Senator from Louisiana said, which is that time after time, we have supported real border security, not a wall that Mexico pays for that gets you attention at campaign rallies from some people in America and that gets talked about on FOX News at night.

In 2013, the Senator from Texas didn't support it. I did. In 2013, we passed a bill here in a bipartisan way. It got 68 votes. It had $46 billion for border security in it--$46 billion, not $5 billion for his rinky-dink wall that he is talking about building. There was $46 billion for border security. To be precise about it, it had 350 miles of what the President now refers to as steel slats.

By the way, America, do you hear him not calling it a wall anymore?

Now it is steel slats. Now it is a border barrier. There were 350 miles of so-called steel slats in that bill.

Do you know what else was in that bill? I think the Presiding Officer voted for that bill. In that bill, we doubled the number of border security agents on the border. They could practically hold hands on that border. There were so many border security agents in that bill. We had billions of dollars of drone technology so that we could learn what we have learned in Afghanistan and in other places, to see every single inch of that border--every inch.

We had internal security in that bill so that small businesses, farmers, and ranchers don't have to be the immigration police, and so that, finally, in America we could actually know who came here legally on a visa but overstayed their visa.

Forty percent of the people in this country who are undocumented are here because they came legally and overstayed. We still can't do that in America because that bill passed the Senate, but it couldn't get a vote in the House because of the stupidest rule ever created, called the Hastert rule, named after somebody who is in prison. That rule has allowed a minority of tyrants in the Congress to bring a Democratic President low--President Obama, whom they didn't let do anything--to ruin the speakership of John Boehner, and to allow Paul Ryan to almost accomplish nothing while he was Speaker, except leaving this place in a government shutdown.

The so-called Freedom Caucus has had a veto around this place for 10 years and completely distorted the Republican Party here, if I do say so myself. That may sound presumptuous, but I know a lot of Republicans in Colorado who don't agree with almost anything or anything that the Freedom Caucus has stood for. Yet they have had a veto on good, bipartisan legislation passed by the U.S. Senate.

So I am not going to stand here and take it from somebody who has shut down the government while my State was flooded or from a President who says that he wants $5 billion to build some antiquated, medieval wall, which he said Mexico would pay for, when I helped write and voted for a bill that actually would have secured the border of the United States of America, that would have secured our internal defenses as well.

This is a joke, and the fact that it consumes the cable networks all night, every night, and all the rest of it--this government should be open. We can debate whatever it is we want to debate.

Do you think the Chinese don't know that we can't land a spaceship on the dark side of the moon? Do you think the Russians don't know that for the first time since John Glenn was sent up to orbit this planet, America cannot put a person into space without asking the Russians to do it? Do you think the rest of the world doesn't know that we are not investing in our infrastructure; that we are not investing in the young generation of Americans; that we are willing to lose the race for artificial intelligence to the Chinese; that we are going to break all of our longstanding alliances since World War II at a moment when China is rising; that China's GDP has quadrupled since 2001, tripled since 2003, doubled since 2009? Do we think that no one in the rest of the world knows all of that about us?

We should reopen this government today. We should reopen it today. Then, what I hope much more than that is that we actually come together to figure out how we are going to govern this country again and stop playing petty, partisan politics, which is going to do nothing to educate the next generation of Americans, which is going to do nothing to fix the fiscal condition of this country.

For 10 years--for 10 years, I have heard the junior Senator from Texas and I have heard the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives talk about how important it is to get the fiscal condition of our government fixed. In fact, that has been the pretext for shutdowns and for fiscal cliffs and for all of this stuff that does nothing but denigrate our democratic Republic.

Now, for the first time almost in history--it happened once before during the Vietnam war--we are actually having our deficit shooting through the roof while unemployment has fallen. It has never happened before. These are the people who called Barack Obama a Bolshevik and a socialist at the depths of the recession, when we had a 10-percent unemployment rate, and didn't lift a finger to do anything. They have now given us a fiscal condition where our deficit is going up while our unemployment rate is falling. Do you know how hard it is to accomplish that? Do you know how irresponsible you would have to be to accomplish that? Yet that is what has been accomplished.

When I was first here--it was actually a little after I was first here--I used to walk through Denver International Airport, which we are very proud of in Colorado. By the way, it is the most recent airport that has been constructed in America. While we have been closed, other airports around the world--new airports have been opened just while we have been closed.

Denver International Airport is the most recent airport in the country to be opened. It was opened 25 years ago--a quarter of a century ago--and during moments like those when the Senator from Texas shut down the government while Colorado was underneath floods and people had lost all of the things I talked about earlier--their houses, their jobs, and their lives--I used to want to walk through that airport with a paper bag over my head because I was so embarrassed to be part of this.

I often wondered why anyone in their right mind would want to work in a place that has a 9-percent approval rating. In fact, I brought a chart--two charts--one day to the floor, one that showed we hadn't always had a 9-percent approval rating, to remind people how far we had fallen in the public's estimation over the time that the Senator from Texas and I have been here. Then I brought out another chart that looked at who else has a 9-percent approval rating. I can't remember all--it has sort of been lost in the mist of time--but I do remember that the IRS had a 40-percent approval rating; there was an actress who had a 13-percent approval rating; more people wanted America to be a Communist country--11 percent--than approved of this Congress; and Fidel Castro had a 5-percent approval rating, which was lower than our 9-percent approval rating. He was the only one who had a lower rating than that.

So my question, often, was this: Why would anybody want to work in a place that has such a low approval rating, and why would they want to behave in a way that only made matters worse?

I am sorry to say this, but there is an answer. If you think you have been sent here to dismantle the Federal Government--and I have lots of problems with this Federal Government. I think it does a lot of things very well, and, as a westerner, I certainly believe we need to not be in the business of defending bad government. We need to be improving the government. But if you think your job is to dismantle it--as the Freedom Caucus does, in my view--then a 9-percent approval rating suits you just fine because you get to go home and say ``See how terrible all of those guys are? See what idiots all of those guys are?'' while you are taking your pay while the Federal workers are not getting paid, while you are keeping your job while they are losing their job.

There has been an effort not just to dismantle the Federal Government but to separate it from the American people, to claim that it is someone else's or that it is corrupt. In many ways, I think it is; I believe it is. I believe this place is one of the most corrupt parts of the whole thing. But because it is corrupt or because it can't get its act together or because it is too far away from the people or, I think I would say, because it is populated by a bunch of self-interested politicians who don't care about the priorities of the American people--whatever the reason is, it is not separate. It is not separate. The reason that is important is that we live in a democratic Republic, and the Founders of this country did two things that had never happened in human history: They led a successful armed insurrection against a colonial power in one generation, and they formed a democratic Republic whose Constitution was ratified by the people who would live under it.

What they knew because they were enlightened thinkers--or I should say not what they knew but what they believed because they had only bad examples from which to draw when they sat there in Philadelphia writing that Constitution--but what they knew was that in a Republic, we would have disagreements. That was their expectation, and their belief was that out of those disagreements we would--and, by the way, they knew we would have disagreements because they had disagreements, and they had failed on some very important things. It has to be said. They perpetuated human slavery because they couldn't come to an agreement about that, and other people, whom I think of as Founders--just as important, just as significant as those Founders--ended the enslavement of human beings in America and did other important things, such as make sure my daughters had the right to vote. Those people also are Founders. But what they believed at their core was that through our disagreements, we would forge more imaginative and more durable solutions than any King or tyrant could come up with on their own. That was their belief. That was their expectation.

I would say that our country, in many ways, has eclipsed any expectation they ever had of what America would become. For the moment, we are the richest country in the world. We have the greatest capacity for self-defense of any human population in the history of the world. We are far more democratic and far more free, with all of our imperfections, than they would have ever imagined and probably than most of them would have ever wanted. We are the longest lived democracy in human history. But, for some reason, there is a generation of politicians in America today who don't think it is necessary to live up to the standard that they set and the standard lots of other people have set from the founding of our country 230 years ago until today.

I don't even know what day it is anymore of this record-long shutdown, but the pretext for it is an invention. It is a creation of something in the President's mind. It was something we have learned from reading the press that was a mnemonic device used during the campaign to remind him to talk about immigration in an effort to divide Americans from one another instead of an effort to bring us together, in an effort to turn what just 3 years ago was a bipartisan issue in the Senate--securing our southern border with $46 billion--into a cudgel to be wielded at campaign rallies.

In any case, the least we could do while we have these shabby disagreements that are not worthy of our predecessors, that are not worthy of the State I represent--which is one-third Democratic, one- third Republican, and one-third Independent--that are threatening to make our generation the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us, a generation of politicians who are openly suggesting that America's role in the world should be diminished--the least we could do is reopen our government and stop pursuing this self-inflicted harm that it creates in having hundreds of thousands of Federal workers out of work and not being paid, not able to support their families while we continue to stand on this floor, having mindless arguments that are going to do nothing to advance the future of our country.

We shouldn't shut the government down, as it has been in this case, for a campaign promise the President, I am sure, knew he could never keep.

With that, I yield floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from Texas for having this conversation. I don't think I was yelling--but I will go watch the tape--or screaming at you. I also have never called anybody on this floor a liar, as you did, in 2015. I get the theatrics of all of this.

I guess I want to say two things. One, I appreciate the fact that you, at least, seem to be accepting the fact that every Democrat who is here, on that immigration bill in 2013, voted for it--voted for the 350 miles of wall you are talking about. You didn't vote for that bill or the Senator from Texas didn't vote for that bill, and I assume you had your reasons.

By the way, I wouldn't presume to think what the Senator would think about as a person from a border State. My State is not far from the border. We see the effects for ill and for good of immigration in my State.

I do know this. There were two Senators from a border State--the border State of Arizona--who were on that Gang of 8 bill, with whom I sat, day after day, negotiating the provisions for months. They didn't have to just vote for the bill or against it, but they had to go home to Arizona--John McCain and Jeff Flake did--and explain why they supported it and why it was the right thing to do for Arizona, which, as the Senator from Texas knows, is a border State.

The idea that there is a problem to be solved here because Democrats in this Chamber are for open borders is false, as the Senator indicated. The second point is, the Senator from Texas referenced Ben Franklin.

Ben Franklin was standing outside the steps of Constitution Hall, and somebody who was passing by--this is while they were writing the Constitution--said: Mr. Franklin, what kind of government are you creating--a monarchy or a republic?

That was the question. As Senator Cruz has said, his answer was ``a Republic, if you can keep it''--if you can keep it. His answer was not ``a Republic''; it was ``a Republic, if you can keep it,'' because he knew that the words written in the Constitution weren't going to preserve themselves, that this exercise in democratic self-government, a democratic republic, would require generations of women and men--not just in this Chamber but as citizens and I would say as founders--to keep the Republic they created.

That is what is at stake here. That is what is at stake when the government has been shut down for politics, when we have a President who doesn't believe in the rule of law, who attacks judges whose decisions he disagrees with, who attacks the free press, who have that freedom because of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It is that Republic which is at risk when we are not educating the next generation of Americans, when we are not investing in our infrastructure, when we have the unbelievable and unprecedented fiscal hypocrisy that has resulted in a ballooning deficit while the unemployment rate is going down. It is a farce. It is a farce.

My closing word is to say that I will work with anybody--including the Senator from Texas, if he will work with me--to put this sorry episode behind us. And I don't mean this sorry episode of this government shutdown, although that is a sorry and pathetic episode, but this episode of American political history where we have done so little for the next generation of Americans and done almost nothing to honor the legacy of our parents and grandparents and the people who came before them. That would be worth doing around this place before we all die.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source